The Sky Ahead of Us
The future is a place
we can see and dream of,
but don’t always know how we will get there.
This is a story about water, people and time, and and what we can learn from the distant past.
In this 13-episode limited broadcast series, The Sky Ahead of Us, we explore the stories about the sudden shift from the way it was then...to the way it is now.
Marketing, communications, educational support and outreach will integrate content for radio, podcasts, and online press, including social media.
Our story begins by showing how the oral histories that have been handed down since the end of the Ice Age inform our view of the world.
Pacific Northwest indigenous groups speak of an ancestral presence in the region “since time immemorial.”
It begins farther back than memory itself–when humans first left their tools in an Alaskan cave. But that's not all that was discovered there.
On Your Knees cave is an archaeological site located on Prince of Wales Island in southeastern Alaska.
Human remains unearthed in 1996–the oldest ever found in Alaska or Canada–were found to be of a young man in his twenties, dating back over 10,000 years.
He is known as Shuká Káa, or Man Ahead of Us.
The Pleistocene, often referred to as the Ice Age, is the geological epoch that lasted about 2.6 million years and ended nearly 11,000 years ago.
The Sky Ahead of Us looks at early human migration, how melting Ice Age glaciers changed landscapes and lives back then, and why today’s climate crisis is threatening humankind now.
The series explores the stories of people experiencing the direct impacts of climate change.
The Sky Ahead of Us makes use of parallel storytelling to connect the past, the present, and the future.
VIDEOS
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EPISODES
Episode 1:
Shuká Káa, Man Ahead of Us
On Your Knees cave is an archaeological site located in southeast Alaska on Prince of Wales Island. Human remains found there in 1996 are believed to be of a young man in his twenties, dating back 10,300 years.
Episode 2:
The Flood
Many archaeologists now agree that the first humans who traveled to the Americas more than 15,000 years ago used a North Pacific coastal route.
Episode 3:
Humans in the First Climate Shift
The Holocene marked the age of complex tool making and social structures. Discovering who went where and why offers a glimpse of the past that can inform our understanding of the present.
Episode 4:
What Myth and Magic Help Us Understand
How do modern humans reconcile a world of myth and magic, as it once existed, with our present experience?
Episode 5:
What's Language Got To Do With It?
Through DNA tests, the members of the Chumash tribe have learned that their ancestors and current relatives may well be all along the west coast of the North American continent. Before European contact, this edge of North America exhibited an exceptionally high level of linguistic diversity, with 90 separate languages spoken in what is present-day California.
Episode 6:
The Web of Nature, Perception, and Consciousness
The stories that have been told for generations carry the sanctity of place and habitation that have legal implications today, connecting language, culture, and the land over thousands of years.
Episode 7:
Early Encounters
In a study published in the journal Nature, Stanford postdoctoral scholar Alexander Ioannidis and his team provide the first conclusive evidence that Polynesians and Native Americans met nearly 300 years before Europeans arrived in North America.
Episode 8:
Desert Revival
The Mojave Desert Land Trust and Native American Land Conservancy are saving southern California’s delicate ecosystems from collapse. Why? The desert, home to long-rooted plants that uptake water as if through a straw, is a major carbon sink. As these plants “breathe” carbon dioxide, that CO2 is deposited deep underground by natural processes.
Episode 9:
The Lost Village
For thousands of years, the Chumash Peoples have lived on the present-day California coast. Before the glaciers melted, the sea level was close to 400 feet lower and the coastline was up to 20 miles out from where it lies today. The Chumash ancient lands now lie under the sea and work is underway to protect and preserve this priceless resource.
Episode 10:
When the Land Disappears
The village of Quinhagak on Alaska’s western coast has partnered with New York’s Pratt Institute to design climate-resistant housing, renewable energy systems, and modern planning solutions to melting permafrost and other threatening conditions.
Episode 11:
Assimilation, Churches, and Schools
Regardless of location or direction, clashes of culture in the modern era between the institutions of power and ancient ways were devastating to first peoples.
Episode 12:
Environmental Alcoholism
“It's environmental alcoholism. This time will be different.”
The Wild, a film by Mark Titus about the controversial, large-scale Pebble Mine project in western Alaska, chronicles his personal journey with substance abuse and its parallels to ecological harm.
Michael Jackson, a Bristol Bay commercial fisherman and friend of the filmmaker says, “You bargain with yourself and how it's going to be different this time, and it never is. It's the same thing every time unless you decide to put a stop to it all.”
Episode 13:
World Elders Building New Leaders
As the repository of traditional knowledge and arbiters of new practices, elders have guided humanity for millennia, resisting negative forces and accepting change that harmonizes with nature. Through observation and great science, humanity has survived with the help of “translational leadership," mediating and explaining current science to the elders while seeking their wisdom to identify the best path forward.
“Elders are those from any aboriginal culture that have reached a state of what Abraham Maslow referred to as 'Self-Transcendence,…the very highest and most inclusive or holistic levels of human consciousness, behaving and relating, as ends rather than means, to oneself, to significant others, to human beings in general, to other species, to nature, and to the cosmos.'”
--Patrick Anderson (Tlingit)
TRIBAL COMMUNITY BENEFITS
The story lines are two-fold and the results multi-fold.
The story lines:
- a large historical story arc representing the last 15,000 years or "the way it was then"
- interwoven with present day stories or "the way it is now"
These present day stories of traditional knowledge and wisdom represent a wide variety of tribes - grounding the historical into the now.
Each episode supports and honors native communities in their responses to climate change within their own cultural context.
The tribal community benefits are multi-fold:
from co-creating episodes to re-using stories for their ongoing fundraising, public outreach, environmental education and other purposes.
It is possible for individual stories to be re-edited for specific tribal use.
This series offers a grand opportunity to put traditional knowledge and wisdom squarely at the center of public awareness and policy debate, with resulting tribal and global benefits.
What People Are Saying
I believe as I carry the great flood song which is several thousands of years old, my ancestors never came over the great ice as some have thought but we have always had canoes large enough to hold families of 20 people. I also know that my relatives travel down to California and Japan and Alaska. The waterways were the highway for tribal people.
This work is absolutely amazing! All of those narratives integrated like a type of eco-mythology of the people and the land.
It's like my prayers have been answered. I saw the videos that were developed, they are so fabulous.
Beautiful. I’m honored and excited to be a part of your amazing work. The timing of your work is great—this is on the front page of today’s paper!
I have chills ALL over my body, from head to toe. The music/sound track, the story, the information, the vibe. It is spectacular!
I'm in... Let's do this.
TEAM
Agence RLA, LLC
GG Films, Inc.
Producers/Directors
Robert Lundahl
Dan Griffin
Producer/Vision
Patrick Anderson (Tlingit)
Producer
Robin Garthwait
Director of Photography
Ryan Hughes
Associate Producer/
Distribution Consultant
Cynthia Zeiden
Associate Producer
Matt Leivas (Chemehuevi/Nu Wu)
Distributor
Zeiden Media
Narrator
Gary Farmer (Cayuga)
Additional Voice
Preston Arrow-Weed (Kamya/Quechan)
Additional Voice
Alexa Dvorson
The Sky Ahead of Us
- Stories -
CONTACT
Robert Lundahl +1 415 205 3481 robert@studio-rla.com
Dan Griffin +1 650 400 2954 dan@ggfilms.com
©Agence RLA, LLC and GG Films, Inc.
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